Politics

Compared to the bulky literature on caste and democracy, we still know little about the form and functioning of democratic politics amongst tribes. This is a serious lacuna, one which, at the level of sociology, impedes the kind of careful comparison that has long proven fruitful to capture the inner logic and intricacies of social life. If caste is deemed central to any understanding of contemporary Indian politics, what about those states and constituencies in which tribes preponderate numerically?

Film stars Kamal Haasan and Rajinikanth are gearing up for the next elections. Rajinikanth wishes to promote a politics based on spirituality, while Haasan is committed to secularism. But both of them have one aim, which is to eradicate corruption from public life in Tamil Nadu. However, this rhetoric of “corruption-free” politics is, in fact, a façade for promoting a politics that sidelines questions of caste inequalities.

Politics of Migration: Indian Emigration in a Globalized World by A Didar Singh and S Irudaya Rajan, New Delhi, London, and New York: Routledge, 2016; pp xix+198, ₹895.

​Routledge Handbook of Contemporary India edited by Knut A Jacobsen; Oxon: Routledge, 2016; pp 506, £130 (hardback).

This paper revisits Indian history when a Hollywood movie, Nine Hours to Rama (1963), claiming to be "a film on Gandhi" turned out to be--much to the Indian government's embarrassment--a biopic on Gandhi's assassin Nathuram Godse. The film, which had been provided sufficient facilities for its making by the government, triggered off a huge uproar in the public sphere and a subsequent ban on the film. It is argued that a peculiar desecration anxiety and the conjoined traumas of patricide and partition linked to the totemic figure of Gandhi engendered such an outcry in India. Similarly, apart from other political contingencies, the film and the evidence of the government's collusion in its making threatened to undermine the Nehruvian government's sovereignty by questioning the legitimacy of its claim to Gandhi's legacy and ultimately resulted in the files related to the film being untraceable in the government archival vaults.